The Birth of Shakespeare's Birthplace

The Birth of Shakespeare's Birthplace Schoch, R. (2012). The Birth of Shakespeare's Birthplace. Theatre Survey, 53(2), 181-201. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040557412000038 Published in: Theatre Survey Document Version: Early version, also known as pre-print Queen's University Belfast - Research Portal: Link to publication record in Queen's University Belfast Research Portal Publisher rights © American Society for Theatre Research 2012. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Queen's University Belfast Research Portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The Research Portal is Queen's institutional repository that provides access to Queen's research output. Every effort has been made to ensure that content in the Research Portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable UK laws. If you discover content in the Research Portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact [email protected]. Download date:01. Oct. 2021 ‘The Birth of Shakespeare’s Birthplace’ Richard Schoch Theatre Survey 53.2 (September 2012), pp. 181-201 ISSN 0040-5574 ‘There is, indeed, little doubt’, the formidable scholar James Orchard Halliwell- Phillips confidently explained to the Victorian readership of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, ‘that the Birth-place did not become one of the incentives for pilgrimage until public attention had been specifically directed toward it at the time of the Jubilee’.i That’s broadly true. The earliest reference to the three-gabled half-timbered house (two houses, originally) on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon as being the birthplace of William Shakespeare dates only from the late 1750s, when it was so named in Samuel Winter’s town map.ii During the Stratford Jubilee led in 1769 by David Garrick, the ‘small old house’, as the actor’s first biographer called it, was fully recognized and promoted as the place where Shakespeare was born.iii Even so, Halliwell-Phillips’s observation conceals more than it reveals. Because there is also little doubt that the dwelling which tradition calls Shakespeare’s birthplace did not suddenly acquire that status during the first week of September 1769. The process by which the unremarkable piece of real estate that John Shakespeare purchased sometime in the late sixteenth century was transformed into what Barbara Hodgdon has rightly called the ‘controlling ideological center’ of Shakespeare biography was long, slow, and far from inevitable. That process is the subject of this essay.iv Repositioning the methods and concerns of scholarship on the Birthplace produced since the middle of the twentieth century, I will explore that portion of the Birthplace’s history—its ‘pre-history’, if you will—that has been almost entirely 1 ignored in accounts of Shakespeare’s formation as a cultural icon: the period from the playwright’s death in 1616 to the Jubilee in 1769. My recuperation of this history does not turn on the discovery of new facts because the archival record was firmly established by the late nineteenth century.v Rather I take a fresh look at archival, critical, and literary materials—some neglected, some nearly canonical in their familiarity—to tell the overlooked story of how the Birthplace became the Birthplace. I tell this story not because it is overlooked but because it is important. By not taking for granted the status that has been conferred upon the house since the late eighteenth century we can better understand the attitudes, events, and choices that led to the conferral of that enduring status. In other words, I am interested in undertaking a longer-range historical study, one that instead of accepting cultural categories as ‘given’ (as existing scholarship on the topic so often does) seeks to understand how those categories emerged and became defined in the first place. Such an investigation, I propose, will unsettle the foundations of Bardolatry by demonstrating that the Birthplace’s status as a key Shakespeare heritage site was a conditional historical outcome produced by identifiable causes, some part of broader trends and some unique to Shakespeare: the rise of critical biography, the popularity of literary tourism, the lack of alternative sites in Stratford, the involvement of those who occupied the premises, and a sympathetic public press. Without the alignment of all those forces in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Birthplace as we know it would not exist. Moreover, by understanding how the Birthplace became the Birthplace we can more perceptively appraise our own engagement with Shakespeare heritage sites. A deeper articulation of the Birthplace’s origins reveals that the discourse of authenticity (or ‘original practices’) which informs the experience of today’s visitors to places like the reconstructed Globe retraces patterns of behavior 2 first associated with the Birthplace more than two hundred and fifty years ago. As I will argue, the playfulness associated with Globe audiences today was also evident in how the earliest visitors to the Birthplace experienced the site. These unexpected historical continuities work to break down the rhetorical divide between Stratford and London that has so strongly marked the history of Shakespeare’s cultural and theatrical afterlife. My revisionist contention that the Birthplace possesses a qualitatively distinctive ‘pre-history’—one that simultaneously complicates our understanding of the past and repositions our experience of the present—departs from standard academic and institutional accounts of Shakespeare’s Stratford. More than six decades ago Levi Fox, then the newly appointed Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, penned a brief narrative history of the site, occasioned by the Trust’s one hundredth anniversary. His account is most notable for articulating a nationalist historiography of redemption: a determined band of ‘Shakespeare lovers’ rescued the derelict Birthplace in 1847 and preserved it for the people of Great Britain. The story of the house before it was elevated into a ‘national memorial’ in the mid nineteenth century was told in a few pages.vi It was as if the Birthplace’s function as a shrine to Shakespeare was an immutable fact: the unmoved mover of Bardolatry prior to which nothing could have existed. In the wave of cultural materialist Shakespeare scholarship that gathered force in the 1980s, the very institution whose centennial Fox had celebrated was attacked for being an instrument of conservative ideology. A leading example is Graham Holderness’s much-cited essay ‘Bardolatry; or, The cultural materialist’s guide to Stratford-upon Avon’ (1988), which asserted that the Shakespeare myth was propagated in Stratford through ‘unscrupulous opportunism, commercial exploitation 3 and gross imposture’.vii Because Holderness’s aim was to demystify the ideological underpinnings of Bardolatry ‘as an organised evangelical movement’, the site’s early history—that is, when Bardolatry was still comparatively unorganized—fell outside the scope of his inquiry.viii In consequence, though, Holderness did not stop to ask how the ‘evangelical movement’ became organized in the first place.ix In different ways, Fox and Holderness both demonstrate how scholarship on Shakespeare’s afterlife and how the institutions charged with maintaining that afterlife have tended to treat as unproblematic the Birthplace’s emergence as a key site of Shakespearean heritage and authenticity. The site’s cultural value, whether championed by Fox or contested by Holderness, has been largely assumed. But a closer scrutiny of the full historical record will show just how quickly such assumptions come unraveled, just how contingent the Birthplace’s rise to prominence has been, and just how unexpectedly the site anticipates contemporary debates about the authenticity of the Shakespeare tourist trade. ‘Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear’ The public identification of Shakespeare with Stratford-upon-Avon began early— seven years after the dramatist’s death—with Leonard Digges’ reference to ‘thy Stratford Moniment’ in his prefatory elegy in the 1623 First Folio.x Yet it was an identification premised on death, not life. The unsurprising theme of Digges’ short poem was that brick-and-mortar memorials to Shakespeare—that is, the grave and funerary statue in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church—would in time disappear whereas his printed ‘Workes’ would survive forever. Ben Jonson shared that view in his more famous commendatory verse from the same volume, proposing that the late author 4 would remain ‘alive still’ so long as his ‘Booke doth live’.xi With Shakespeare figured as disembodied genius—‘Soule of the age’, as Jonson lastingly put it—how easy it must have been for readers of the First Folio to ignore the Warwickshire market town where the first son of Mary Arden and John Shakespeare was born, baptized, grew up, married, acquired land and tithes, bought one house and inherited another, sued his debtors, retired, wrote his will, and died.xii Nowhere in the various prefaces to the First Folio is there any mention of two houses in Stratford that then would have carried Shakespearean associations, if not necessarily sentiments: New Place, the handsome residence on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane, which the thirty-three year old Shakespeare had bought in 1597, and where nineteen years later he died; and on the north side of Henley Street, the humbler tenement where in 1564 he was born.xiii The ownership of New Place has been amply documented from the time when Hugh Clopton bequeathed it to his brother’s heir during the reign of Henry VII, a full century before it was purchased by another Stratford native who had made a name for himself in London.

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